“The criticism that CSS websites have looked plain is really well deserved
but the reason that CSS driven sites have looked plain to date is that the
people who have created those sites have not been visual artists they haven’t
have strong graphic design skills and I totally include myself in that category.”

So says Eric (middle name CSS)
Meyer in an interview with Radio
NZ’s Digital Life (transcript
available here). It’s another one of those useful documents to file away
and recall when you find a client or manager asking “Why should I bother with
web standards”, and it covers the myth of ugly CSS
sites (citing CSS
Zen Garden as an example that this is not necessarily true) and the realities
of commercial sites moving across to standards (ESPN
example quoted).

Elsewhere in the world of standards, Dave Hyatt writes in Surfin
Safari: "If there’s a bug that we didn’t fix that you’ve been clamoring
for in every beta, feel free to mention it in your lists. I will read all trackbacks
and look for the most popular requests." This is an interesting way of
tracking what users find most frustrating — after all, not all users will
go to the trouble of entering something in Bugzilla. Given how closely Dave is associated with the development of the Safari browser, this is a very open approach
to addressing what the public feels is most important.

But let’s just stop to think about this for a minute — how many Safari
users are there? Sure, a lot of people swear by that browser, but compare this
with the number of IE/Windows users worldwide and it pales into insignificance.
Yet, despite the smaller user base and the smaller development team, Safari
is addressing bugs that, so far, Microsoft seems reticent to with its browser.
We would like to remind Microsoft — and the industry as a whole —
that thisis important to us, and if Dave and his team can come up with the
goods, we would expect Microsoft to be able to do the same.